One of the most obvious missing pieces of the flood story in Parashat Noah is the voice of Noah’s wife. From the building of the ark, through the fortnight of rain, through the months of floating and waiting thereafter, we do not hear a peep out of Mrs. Noah. We know that she is there; the Torah declares that she boards the ark with him, along with his sons and their wives as well. But there is no glimpse of how she is feeling. A midrash (Bereshit Rabba 23:3) declares that her name is Na’amah, meaning “pleasant one,” because she played a drum to accompany idolatrous worship. (Interesting and ironic, but not so helpful.)
So we are left to wonder: did she approve of her husband’s gargantuan task? Did she maintain peace within the family as they were cooped up in this floating zoo? Did she resent having to help shovel manure, or feed the aardvarks? Did she lock herself up in her cabin until the whole ordeal was over? Or perhaps she was discreetly running the entire operation, according to the principle of the matriarch in the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding, that Noah was the head, and Na’amah was the neck that turned the head any way she wanted.
For all of its effort to relate a sweeping epic about God’s attempt to fashion a better humanity, the Torah says surprisingly little about the humans who make it possible, and what is said at all only describes the men. You might have thought that the Torah would also give us some kind of hint about the character of the women, particularly if they are to be the mothers of all subsequent people on Earth.
But no. While there are many places in the Tanakh and in later rabbinic literature that mention women and ascribe to them ideas and motives and character, they are, at least compared to the men, few and far between. And that is, of course, a pattern that continues on the Jewish bookshelf until the 20th century.
Certainly, there are a few shining examples that we highlight: in the Tanakh / Hebrew bible we find the Matriarchs, Miriam HaNev’iah / the prophetess, the Daughters of Tzelofehad (who challenge Moshe on inheritance law because they have no brothers), Devorah the Judge; Ruth actually gets a whole book, although it’s a short one. In the Talmud, there is Beruriah, wife of Rabbi Meir. In the late 17th and early 18th century, there is Glikl, about whom I spoke on Yom Kippur.
And the number of female commentators on the Torah that appear alongside Rashi and Ibn Ezra and Ramban in traditional rabbinic commentaries? Frankly, none, unless some of these medieval commentators were actually writing under an assumed, male name (that is, the rabbinic equivalent of George Eliot), although this possibility seems remote. (BTW, while Rashi’s daughters are purported to have donned tefillin, they did not write Torah commentary as far as we know.)
A standard tool that I and all Jewish educators use is the “source sheet”. If I want to teach a certain item in Jewish life or text, I assemble a sheet of sources related to the item, usually starting with a verse of Torah and then followed by Rashi and other commentators. If there is a modern source that suits my interpretive goals, I will include that, although I don’t always make it to the 20th century. (Rabbis often prefer the company of ancient thinkers to contemporaries.)
We are fortunate today to have the wonderful online resource Sefaria.org, which not only includes many, many works from the Jewish tradition in digital form, but also has an online source sheet builder tool! You just select the sources and add them to your sheet, and then you can edit as desired. It’s truly a gift.
Unfortunately, Sefaria does not pick the sources for you as you are building your argument – that’s up to the user. I curate the sources.
So if you read The Jewish Chronicle (and you should), you might be able to guess at this point where I am heading. A few weeks back, there was an article about The Kranjec Test, named after a member of Beth Shalom, Danielle Kranjec, who serves as the Hillel Jewish University Center’s Senior Jewish Educator. You may recall that Danielle spoke in this space as the featured guest for Sisterhood Shabbat back in February, although I know that anything pre-pandemic seems so far away and dreamlike now… (In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that Danielle is not just a good friend and fellow alum of the Jewish Theological Seminary, where we used to live across the hall from each other, but I also officiated at her wedding a number of years back. So I know her pretty well.)
Here is The Kranjec Test, in a nutshell:
When building a source sheet with more than two sources, Jewish educators (including, of course, rabbis) should include at least one non-male-identified voice.
According to Danielle and a few other educators who introduced the test in a blog post on the eJewishPhilanthropy site, the idea is to elevate women’s voices, teach women’s wisdom, and learn what she refers to as “women’s Torah,” that is, perspectives that emerge from women’s lived experience of our tradition.
(It would of course be “cheating” to identify God’s voice as non-male. Although God does not have a gender and is therefore not male, we are going to assume that quoting the Torah itself, if we understand that as Divine in origin, does not qualify because the Qadosh Barukh Hu is just, well, above all that. While the rigidly-gendered Hebrew language almost always refers to God as male, that is more due to the limitations of human language than our understanding of God.)
So, given what I said before about the overwhelming maleness of the Jewish bookshelf, reflecting both a shortage of female characters as well as authors, this is clearly not so easy. The authors of the original blog post concede that they have failed to pass the test consistently.
Speaking from my own experience, of course, I know that when I am assembling a source sheet, my collection of sources is based not on the identity of the authors, but rather on their teaching, and in particular that the teaching fits my agenda. Ideally, a source sheet is tight and focused, so that it does not stray far beyond the matter at hand.
But I must say that Danielle is absolutely right: we are way past the time that women’s voices should always be featured prominently in what we teach as a community.
As a fully egalitarian congregation, we count women as equals toward the minyan, in leading services and reading Torah and in fulfilling all our ritual roles. The same of course is true for gender non-binary individuals, although of course we are still struggling with liturgy and customs, as many of these include gendered language. (You may have noticed that when our member Debby Gillman chanted the Hineni on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, she used the feminized text of that prayer found in Mahzor Lev Shalem.)
But, as you have heard me say many times in this space, the most important mitzvah among the 613 is not prayer; it’s not keeping Shabbat or kashrut or Pesah, and it for sure isn’t lighting Hanukkah candles or remembering the Sho’ah, although of course all these things are important. The most foundational mitzvah of Jewish life is Talmud Torah, learning the words of Torah.
And if those words of Torah are a male-only sphere, shame on us.
So that brings us back to the humble source sheet. I must say that I have a handful of Torah commentaries written and edited by women that do the work that The Kranjec Test suggests. They take up, admittedly, a much smaller portion of the shelves in my office populated by male commentators, and of course they are all from the last 50 years or so. And while I have made an effort to include women’s voices, I have certainly not made that my primary goal in teaching Torah. So I am going to try to dig a little deeper and work a little harder at that. And I cannot promise that I will pass The Kranjec Test every time. Because I certainly will not.
But I am going to try.
Pulling back the lens a bit, we might consider the following business mantra as a guiding principle in this regard: Under-promise and over-deliver. It is a rough analog to the ancient wisdom of Shammai found in Pirqei Avot (1:15): אֱמֹר מְעַט וַעֲשֵׂה הַרְבֵּה – say little and do much.
One of the overarching principles of living Jewishly is that we give each other kaf zekhut, the benefit of the doubt – that we assume that one has noble intentions, even if he or she fails. Noah, after all, manages to save humanity and all of God’s creatures, but then suffers from a humiliating episode involving alcohol. We still give credit to Noah for what he accomplished; the Torah judges him to be at least somewhat righteous.
So during this transition period as we strive to elevate women’s voices in teaching and learning Torah, let’s under-promise and over-deliver, and give one another a bit of kaf zekhut.
~
Rabbi Seth Adelson
(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 10/24/2020.)
The Modern Rabbi 